


The Disappearance of Bruce Speta

by FootlessData507



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Case Fic, F/M, Light-Hearted, MSR UST, set sometime in season 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-18
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-17 00:14:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11839986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FootlessData507/pseuds/FootlessData507
Summary: Mulder and Scully get the chance to investigate "a good old fashioned haunting," but the case ultimately takes Scully somewhere she never intended to go.





	1. Break

**Author's Note:**

> This is set sometime in season six. It makes references to a couple of specific episodes, but doesn't have anything that spoiler-y. Hope you like it!

The car was making that noise again—a sort of knocking sound just behind the glove compartment when she turned on the air conditioning. Tina groaned and switched the air off, rolling down the windows. It was July 7th, the first day of the year hot enough to justify air conditioning. Bruce had promised he would get the air conditioning checked out last August when it had started making that noise. Eleven months had gone by and he’d never taken their car in?  
  
Typical. When did Bruce ever do anything on time? In fact, she was at the airport hours later than she’d originally planned because Bruce had missed his scheduled flight. He’d slept through his alarm clock and had to book another one. But now he was back in Columbus, as he’d confirmed forty minutes ago when he’d called her at the exact moment she’d called him.  
  
She smiled. Once in a blue moon, Bruce’s timing was perfect—right in step with her own.  
  
It had only been a few days, but she’d missed him.  
  
She snapped her bubble gum and turned up the speaker volume so that her music was audible over the traffic of the other cars and the planes flying overhead.  
  
“Come a little bit closer, you’re my kind of man, so big and so strong…” she crooned along with Jay & the Americans. She ignored the attention she was attracting from the man driving the car next to her. “Come a little bit closer, I’m all alone, and the night is so long…”  
  
In reality, it wasn’t night at all, but 3:30 on a Saturday afternoon. Tina wished Bruce’s flight had been arriving at a less popular hour—the airport’s roads were crammed with idling cars, and the fumes were getting to her. Noting the approaching turn off labeled “DOMESTIC ARRIVALS,” she flipped on her left turn signal and tried to move over to the crammed left lane.  
  
“Come on—come on—let me in…” She drummed her fingers against the steering wheel, and attempted to edge her Saturn in front of a Ford, which honked its horn and moved as far forward as it could on the constipated road. “I need to get in!” she shouted to the Ford driver who no doubt couldn’t hear her, considering his windows were rolled up and he was probably blasting his operational air conditioning.  
  
When the Camry in front of the Ford moved up, the Ford lurched forward, and the driver flipped her off.  
  
“Oh, real nice!” she snapped, but finally managed to move into the left lane by edging in front of a less defensive Toyota.  
  
Idling once more, she checked the itinerary she’d printed out. It looked like she was headed to Delta D3…and Bruce’s flight had gotten in forty minutes ago, meaning he’d probably had enough time to get his bag from luggage claim. With any luck, she’d pull up to D3 and there her husband would be waiting for her. He’d climb into the car and give her a quick kiss.  
  
Since she was stuck in traffic, she occupied herself by imagining their conversation once Bruce sat down.  
  
‘Whew!’ he’d say, fanning himself with his itinerary print out, ‘it’s like I died and went to Hell! Aren’t you hot?’  
  
‘That’s what the boys tell me,’ she’d reply.  
  
He’d laugh at this. ‘Remind me not to go on any more business trips out of town…’ Then he’d try turning on the air conditioning, and would turn it back off as soon as it started its knocking noise. He’d wince. ‘I promised to get that fixed, didn’t I?’ he’d say.  
  
She’d nod. ‘You did.’  
  
‘I’ll bring it into the mechanic on Monday.’  
  
‘You will,’ she’d agree.  
  
‘I love you,’ he’d say.  
  
‘I love air conditioning,’ she’d reply.  
  
After four years of marriage, sometimes it felt like she didn’t even need Bruce. She could play both sides of a domestic scene without him.  
  
Jay & the Americans had played through six more songs on their best of CD before Tina managed to pull in front of D3. She looked around the crowd, but didn’t see Bruce’s toothy smile anywhere. She checked her Nokia, and saw a string of texts.  
  
“Just landed. Flight uneventful. Only nosedived twice.”  
  
“W8ng @ baggage claim. Have taken 3 bags that dont belong 2 me. Making suitcase fort.”  
  
“Still @ baggage claim. Taking 4ever.”  
  
“Here lies Bruce Speta. Died doing what he loved: waiting at baggage claim.”  
  
“C my camouflage bag rolling 2 me. It foolishly thought it could hide. B there soon.”  
  
“@ arrival pick up now. D3. Waiting 4u.”  
  
Hmm…he said he was there. She scanned the crowd again, but couldn’t see her husband anywhere. She sent him a quick text message: “@ D3. Dont cu.”  
  
He sent a message back almost immediately. “Dont cu. Where ru?”  
  
She rolled her eyes. “I just told you where I am,” she growled. “Where are you?” She surveyed the crowd once more: three families, a bored-looking teenager listening to a Walkman, an elderly couple, a man a good foot taller than her Bruce shamelessly reading Celebrity Skins, seven giggling women wearing daisy dukes and T-shirts that read “Layla’s Bachelorette Squad”—but where was Bruce?  
  
Her ringtone chimed and Bruce’s name flashed across the screen.  
  
“Bruce, you butt munch,” she said into the phone as she lowered the stereo volume, “where are you?”  
  
“What do you mean, stinky breath?” Bruce said on the other end. His voice sounded strange—far away and static-y. “Where are you?”  
  
“At D3—”  
  
“Excuse me, ma’am!” An airport security guard was standing by her window. “This isn’t a parking area. It’s for pickups. You’ll have to move along.”  
  
“Oh, I am picking someone up,” she explained. “My husband’s here—”  
  
The security guard rolled his eyes. “It’s for immediate pickups, ma’am. If he’s not here now, you’ll have to move along and make another circuit.”  
  
“I know, it’s just—” she spoke into her phone, “Bruce, seriously get here right now! I can’t stay parked here.”  
  
“I am here!” he shouted. “You’re driving the Saturn, right?”  
  
The security guard was waving his hand in her face. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to put down your cell phone and drive. You can’t block the pickup lane like this.”  
  
“But sir, I’m picking someone up! He’s here!”  
  
“Tina!” Bruce was exclaiming over ear-aching static. “Tina—I can barely hear you—what’s going on?”  
  
“Ma’am—”  
  
Everything seemed very loud—the honking cars behind her (Hey, move it, lady!), the guard urging her to move forward (If you don’t leave now, I’m going to have to—), Bruce’s shouts (Tina—I don’t understand—where are you?)—the _shoom_ of nearby planes—and under it all, Jay  & the Americans belted out _Let’s Lock the Door_. And she could swear she could hear that damn knocking noise again. And it was so hot and where was he?  
  
“ _Bruce, get your ass in this car right now!_ ” she screamed into the phone.  
  
“Tina—I—” and then Bruce’s voice disappeared, entirely consumed by static.  
  
“Ma’am, you need to leave now,” the guard repeated. “Make another circuit. Your husband will be there waiting for you then.”  
  
Tina took a deep breath, set down her cell phone, and nodded. “Yeah, okay.”  
  
The guard stepped away, Tina put her turn signal on, and she drove away. She’d make another circuit. Then Bruce would be there waiting for her.  
  
She made another circuit.  
  
He wasn’t.  
  
***  
  
Scully studied the photo Mulder had handed her. A woman in her late 30s, chubby cheeked with short, curly, dark hair. Although she had prominent laugh lines, her expression in the photo itself was neutral. Probably from a driver’s license or passport, judging from the white background.  
  
“Is she an alien or a werewolf?” Scully asked. She set the photo back on Mulder’s desk, where it joined three file folders, an issue of _The Lone Gunman_ , and a tabloid asserting Elvis was currently living in Florida and had some quick and easy weight-loss tips to share.  
  
Mulder grinned. “The woman in the photo—Tina Walters-Speta—is more interesting than any mundane extra-terrestrial or lycanthrope. She holds the dubious distinction of expecting a crummier upcoming Valentine’s Day than yours truly.”  
  
Scully raised an eyebrow and waited for her partner to elaborate. Mulder handed her another photo, this time with Tina and a short bespectacled man standing in front of the spinning teacups ride at Disneyland. The man looked horribly sunburned, but had a large, toothy grin. One of his hands rested on Tina’s shoulder, and the other held a red candied apple.  
  
“The man in the photo is Bruce Speta,” Mulder explained. “He and Tina got married five years ago. This photo is from their honeymoon.”  
  
“They look happy…” Scully noted.  
  
“Happiest place on Earth, Scully,” Mulder commented. “Something to keep in mind for your honeymoon.”  
  
“I’m sure my husband will look great in a Goofy hat…” Scully commented drily. She handed back the photo. “So, where’s the X-File?”  
  
“Bruce Speta is an electrical engineer,” Mulder explained. Then he paused. “Well, was an electrical engineer. He hasn’t been to work in eight months.”  
  
“What’s he been doing?”  
  
Mulder shrugged. “No one knows. He went missing after a business trip back in July. Just wasn’t at the airport, even though it looks like he did board the plane. Tina filed a missing person report, but the police couldn’t turn anything up. The investigation has been closed.”  
  
“Okay, I see where the crummy Valentine’s Day comes in,” Scully said, folding her arms, “but I’m failing to see where the X-File comes in, Mulder.” She internally prayed that Mulder wouldn’t claim that Bruce Speta had been abducted. She didn’t think she could take another abduction case right now.  
  
“Tina lives in a house in Columbus. We’ve been asked to look into some claims she’s making.”  
  
Abduction claims? “Those claims being?” She could tell it was something bad based on the way Mulder had held back the true nature of the case until now.  
  
“Hauntings,” Mulder told her.  
  
There it was. There was the X-File. There was her Mulder.  
  
“Hauntings,” she parroted expressionlessly.  
  
“Hauntings,” confirmed Mulder with a nod of his head. “What we have here is a veritable smorgasbord of classic ghostly phenomena. We have—” Mulder’s cadence quickened, and he almost sounded like he was announcing prizes on the world’s worst game show, “creaking floorboards, mysterious sounds, appliances and lights turning on and off, unexplained smells, and the kicker,” he grinned and passed her another picture, “words written in a steamy mirror.”  
  
Yes, there it was. A steamy mirror with words written on it.  
  
“‘Redrum, redrum, redrum’?” Scully read and rolled her eyes. She shoved the photo at her partner. “Mulder, you can’t be serious!”  
  
“Why reinvent the wheel, Scully? What did you _want_ the mirror to say?”  
  
“Oh, I don’t know…” Scully paused. “How about ‘I’m a lonely woman who never thought she would have to pass the most romantic night of the year alone again’?”  
  
“So, you think she’s making it up?”  
  
“I think…” Scully sighed and looked at the picture of Tina and Bruce smiling at Disneyland. She did feel sorry for her, and she didn’t want to be too heartless. “I think when a person is lonely and profoundly upset, sometimes the human brain imagines things that aren’t really so…”  
  
“But she’s not imagining these phenomena, Scully,” Mulder informed her. “She’s had the electrical company and plumbers out to her property on numerous occasions to check out the lights and water that keep turning on and off, and they confirmed her story. They can’t explain it, but for some reason, the faucets and appliances in this house turn on for short periods of time by themselves. And most days at 9 pm, the shower starts going. It continues going for 10 minutes, and if you turn it off, it just switches back on.”  
  
“Mulder,” Scully paced to the other side of the office, “there could be dozens of non-paranormal explanations for that!”  
  
“Such as…?”  
  
Scully tried to summon some explanation, but every explanation she could think of (something living in the pipes?) sounded even lamer than a haunting. Finally, she settled on the less than impressive reply, “I don’t know! I’m not a plumber!”  
  
“Well Winegar  & Sons are,” Mulder held up a report from the plumber corroborating Tina’s story. “So are JMT Plumbing, and Walsch Plumbing. They all say the same thing. Same story with the electricians.” Mulder put down the report and rubbed his hands together. “What we’ve got here, Scully, is a prime opportunity to investigate a good old fashioned haunting. Hope you don’t have any Valentine’s Day plans because…” he extracted plane tickets from his suit pocket, “we’re headed to Columbus on Sunday.”  
  
Scully took one of the tickets from him and glared. No, she didn’t have any Valentine’s Day plans, of course. But Mulder could have at least paid her the courtesy of pretending like it was a real possibility.  
  
“Fine,” she sighed, and headed home to pack.  
  
She’d have to cancel the teeth cleaning she’d had scheduled for Monday. Again. Her dentist was getting rich off her cancellation fees.


	2. Arrival

The flight to Columbus was uneventful, the rental car pickup was quick, and the roads to Tina Walters-Speta’s house were nearly empty. The snow was thin, the outside air was a degree or two above freezing, and Mulder was quiet. As they pulled into a subdivision, Scully remarked to herself that so far, she hadn’t found a single thing to complain about. Driving down Valleywood Drive flanked by rows of identical, beige houses, this felt more like visiting family than investigating an X-File.  
  
Mulder slowed down the car as they reached a curve in the road, and he studied the numbers nailed to a house’s porch beam.  
  
“323,” he read. “Looks like this is it.” He pulled into the driveway of a two-car garage, and Scully studied the attached home.  
  
It certainly didn’t look like a haunted house. It deviated from the surrounding houses only in that the siding had been painted pastel green. Small bushes grew at the sides of the lawn, and a mailbox sat out front labeled “Speta & Walters-Speta.” Small tracks were visible in the thin layer of snow—rabbit tracks, Scully guessed.  
  
“If I were a ghost,” Mulder commented, joining Scully on the sidewalk, holding his duffel bag and her wheeled suitcase, “I think I’d try haunting something a little more ambitious.”  
  
“Like the women’s locker room?”  
  
He winked at her and strode forward, climbing up the porch steps and pressing the doorbell. Scully joined him as the door whipped open, revealing a beaming Tina Walters-Speta.  
  
“You’re early!” she exclaimed, grabbing the wheeled suitcase and ushering them inside. “Come in—come in!”  
  
Again, the word “haunted” was not the word Scully would have applied. “Warm” and “inviting” maybe, but not “haunted.” The foyer walls were light yellow and covered with photos of smiling friends and family. The foyer led into a low-ceilinged living room in which sat a large rose-patterned sofa next to a glider rocking chair. An orange cat that had been sleeping on the rocker lifted its head, blinked at the new arrivals, and shot off into another room.  
  
“You must be Dana!” Tina exclaimed and pressed Scully into a hug. Scully stood ramrod straight, her blue eyes wide. She tried to think of a time someone on a case had referred to her by her first name and hugged her. She came up empty.  
  
Tina released her and looked at her expectantly.  
  
“Um…” Scully struggled to recover. “Yes, you must be Ms. Walters-Speta…”  
  
“Oh, please!” Tina laughed. “Just Tina’s fine! Any friend of Fox is a friend of mine!”  
  
_Fox?_ Scully swiveled around and studied “Fox” sharply. He flashed Scully a sheepish grin before being engulfed in a hug from Tina.  
  
“And Fox, it’s so nice to see you!” Tina was saying. “Look at you, big FBI man!” she slapped him on the arm. “You look great! How long has it been—fifteen years?”  
  
“At least,” Mulder replied. “The last time I saw you, you were still working at that dive in Bethesda.”  
  
“Ugh, Marconi’s!” Tina wrinkled her stub nose. “Don’t remind me! Here—let me take your coats…” After hanging their bulky coats in a closet, she led them over to the living room and gestured for them to take a seat, which they did. “You know,” she continued, “I still keep in touch with some of the kitchen staff from there, and that place was finally shut down last year for 51 health code violations. Anyway…” she walked to the archway through which the cat had disappeared, “let me get you two something to drink—coffee, tea, water, something stronger—Fox, I know you love my iced tea—I made some especially for you.” She paused. “Dana, what will you have?”  
  
“Um…” Scully could barely think. What on Earth was going on, here? Tina was acting like she and Mulder were old friends. Mulder didn’t have friends! “Water is fine,” she finally said.  
  
Mulder accepted the offer of iced tea, and Tina disappeared into the other room. As soon as she did, Scully jerked towards Mulder and glared at him.  
  
“What is going on?” she hissed.  
  
Mulder wasn’t meeting her eyes, instead staring at a wedding picture of Tina and Bruce that sat on the coffee table. “I may have neglected to mention something,” he admitted.  
  
“Yes, I’d say that’s true,” Scully agreed. She picked up the photo Mulder had been staring at and swiveled it around so its back faced them. “Why didn’t you tell me that you know this woman?”  
  
Mulder sighed and met her eyes. “Tina’s an old family friend,” he explained softly. “My mother heard that she was having this problem and she suggested I go out to check these alleged hauntings…”  
  
Scully suspected Mulder was only using the word “alleged” to placate her. It wouldn’t work. “Mulder!” she gasped. “Is this even an FBI case?”  
  
“Well, yes…” Mulder nodded slowly, “in that you and I are FBI agents and we’re here…”  
  
“You know what I mean! You’re using official resources on a personal favor?”  
  
Mulder winced. “I thought you wouldn’t like it—that’s why I didn’t tell you.” He seemed to have realized that was the wrong thing to say, and he hastily continued. “It’s not like _that_ Scully—I’m not misusing funds from Joe Taxpayer. I paid for the rental car personally, I used my frequent flier miles for the plane tickets, and Tina’s putting us up, so there’s no hotel—so really, this is all above board.” He shot her a hopeful smile, which was met with a sour expression.  
  
“But we’re still here _investi_ —”  
  
Scully put a pin in her scolding when Tina returned to the living carrying two glasses, which she placed on coasters with pictures of cats on them. Scully shot Mulder a look to warn him that this topic wasn’t closed.  
  
“I’m so glad to meet you, Agent Scully,” Tina replied, perhaps having picked up on some of the frostiness emanating from one side of the sofa. Tina sat in the glider and angled her body so she was facing Scully rather than Mulder. “Teena told me about you—she’s very impressed by you. I’m so grateful that you’ve agreed to help me out on this—I’m at my wit’s end.”  
  
Scully murmured some thanks, and wondered how much of that statement was an embellishment from Tina. Scully had only rarely met with Mulder’s mother, and the woman had never communicated any particular admiration of her. Then again, she admitted, they had only met under rather fraught circumstances.  
  
Well, better to get this over with. “You said you’re at your wit’s end,” Scully said. “Could you tell us about the activity that has been distressing you?”  
  
“I can do more than tell you,” Tina replied. She checked her watch and stood up. “It’s 7:57, so it should be happening any time now. Come on,” she waved for them to follow her, and stepped through the doorway.  
  
They followed her through a hallway into a den. The room had very little natural light, shelves full of VHS tapes, laserdiscs, and DVDs, and a television larger than anyone needed.  
  
Mulder whistled at the television in admiration. “Is that a 60 inch?” he asked.  
  
Tina nodded. “Yeah, Bruce is sort of an AV geek…” her smile weakened, “ _was_ an AV geek.” She sighed. “I don’t know. Anyway…” she folded her arms and looked at the digital clock on the wall, which now read 7:58, “it’s a Sunday night, and _The Simpsons_ will be starting in two minutes.” She nodded to the television. “It’s about to turn on.”  
  
The digital clock had a second countdown, and Scully found herself watching the seconds fly by. After thirty seconds, Mulder leaned over to her and whispered, “I feel like singing _Auld Lang Syne_.”  
  
Waiting for an episode of _The Simpsons_ to start with a widow and her coworker—what a sad New Year’s Eve celebration that would be.  
  
Instead, she was spending her Valentine’s Day doing it. Was that better or worse?  
  
Mulder was grinning, and mouthing, “ten, nine, eight…”  
  
And then—  
  
The television clicked on, the screen illuminated with a blue sky and clouds. “ _The Simpsons…_ ” the surround sound speakers sang.  
  
“See?” Tina pointed at the television, as if it needed pointing at. “Unless I turn it off, it will stay on until _The Simpsons_ is over. And then it will turn off. On its own.”  
  
“And you’re sure it’s not on a timer?” Scully asked. “This looks like a pretty advanced set up.” She surveyed the tower of electronics on the side of the television. She couldn’t even identify half of the equipment.  
  
Tina shook her head. “I’ve had specialists come and look at it—and anyway, it never used to do this—just turn on randomly…”  
  
“Only it’s not randomly,” Mulder corrected her, chuckling slightly at _The Simpsons_ couch gag (the Simpsons had mismatched hair). “It’s every Sunday at the same time, right?”  
  
“Well…not _every_ Sunday,” Tina admitted. “It started happening in August—”  
  
“ _August?_ ” Scully repeated, frowning. She’d assumed the haunting had been a recent phenomenon. That fit in with the ‘lonely widow doesn’t want to be alone on Valentine’s Day’ theory she’d been harboring.  
  
Tina nodded. “Most of the strange stuff has been happening ever since July,” she explained. “The lights—the appliances—that sort of stuff. The television has been turning on since July, too. But it’s been turning on at specifically this time almost every week since August.” She picked up a notebook from a side table. “I’ve been tracking it. It occasionally skips a week or two, but for the most part, it’s been pretty much every Sunday since late August.”  
  
Mulder leaned over her and studied the notebook on which she’d scribbled dates and times. “Do you mind if I take a look at this?” he asked.  
  
She handed it to him. “Go ahead. You can keep it, if you want.”  
  
Mulder started flipping through the notebook, finding the other pages similarly marked up.  
  
“I’ve been trying to keep track of as many things as I could,” Tina explained. “Some days will go by and absolutely nothing strange will happen. But then some days, a lot of things happen—Saturdays and Sundays tend to be worse than weekdays.”  
  
“Looks like a lot of different phenomena…” Mulder murmured.  
  
Scully sidled closer to him and read Tina’s scrawl. Tina had apparently given up marking every time the lights or faucets went on and off back in July, but other more particular instances had recent notes. The stereo, for instance, had been turned on just two days ago, the oven had been turned on last week (accompanied by a note saying “bad smell,”), and printer had started printing tax records back in in January. Scully squinted at one entry she didn’t understand.  
  
“What’s this one?” she asked, pointing to an entry from five days ago. “Zelda—loading screen?”  
  
“Oh, that…” Tina sighed and opened up a cabinet. She pointed at a black piece of plastic Scully could only assume was a video game system. “Sometimes I’ll walk into the den and this thing will be hooked up to the television with a game in progress.”  
  
“There was an intruder?” Scully arched her eyebrow. Someone had actually hooked up a piece of electronics? How had this gotten buried under flickering lights and haywire stereos?  
  
“I don’t know…I…” Tina sighed. “I’ve had the police search the place, I put in an alarm system—there have times when I thought I’d heard something but I’ve never—I’ve never caught him in the act.”  
  
“’Him’?” Scully questioned, even though she knew full well what person Tina was referring to.  
  
Tina blinked at her. “Well, isn’t it obvious? It’s Bruce. Who else could it be?”  
  
***  
  
Tina left them shortly after. It was Valentine’s Day, an all-hands-on-deck night at the restaurant where she worked, so even though she didn’t normally work Sundays, she’d gotten stuck with a shift, albeit a shorter shift than usual. She’d promised to bring them back something delicious if they didn’t mind waiting a few hours for it. In the meantime, she told them, if they felt hungry, they were welcome to anything in the kitchen.  
  
She’d also briefly shown Scully the master bedroom, where she would be staying.  
  
“You’ll have a better opportunity to see the strange stuff, there,” she’d explained. “The master bathroom is where the shower turns on every night. I’ll stay in the guest bedroom—nothing ever happens in there.”  
  
Mulder had volunteered to sleep on the couch of the den. Scully wasn’t sure if he was volunteering from habit, gallantry, or the _Planet of the Apes_ laserdisc he’d been covertly admiring.  
  
The master bedroom was decorated in the same style of as the living room: pastel colors, floral designs, with more items depicting cats than Scully would have preferred. A quick look under the bed revealed that the only things there were one shoebox and an annoyed looking cat.  
  
Next, she opened the closet to find drawers and hanging clothes. Bruce’s clothing was still there. She doubted Tina had removed anything of his.  
  
When she stepped in the master bathroom, she half expected to find “LOOK BEHIND YOU” or “HAVE YOU CHECKED ON THE CHILDREN?” scrawled on the mirror. But nothing. It looked like your typical bathroom.  
  
“What are we doing here, Mulder…?” she murmured to herself, pulling the shower curtain aside to find…yep, an empty shower.  
  
Not that a change of pace was necessarily bad, but this just felt like a waste of her time.  
  
Hmm…two toothbrushes sitting in the “Hartman Engineering Solutions” mug.  
  
If her husband had disappeared, Scully wondered how long she would keep his toothbrush in the bathroom before throwing it out. Four months? A year? Even longer?  
  
Just how long were you supposed to keep a toothbrush, anyway? Only three months, right? She privately promised herself that if this ever happened to her, she would throw the toothbrush away after three months. Not that this would ever happen to her. For several reasons. The first of which being that she was spending Valentine’s Day investigating a haunted house with a colleague and his old family friend.  
  
“I guess the ghost doesn’t like _That ‘70s Show,_ ” Mulder was leaning against the door jamb. “The TV turned off as soon as it started.”  
  
“Mulder…” Scully sighed, “what are we doing here?”  
  
He looked at her curiously and stepped forward. “We’re investigating—”  
  
“—This isn’t an investigation,” Scully corrected him. “This is a personal favor to some friend of yours. This isn’t an X-File.”  
  
“—but the television—”  
  
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Mulder!” Scully sighed, leaning against the vanity. “This isn’t _The Poltergeist_ —”  
  
“—excellent documentary,” Mulder added, leaning beside her on the vanity. “They have a copy on laserdisc if you want to—”  
  
“Exactly—laserdiscs!” Scully waved her hand to illustrate her point. “This Bruce guy was an early adopter of new technology _and_ an engineer. He probably programmed his television to turn on for _The Simpsons!_ Maybe he did it in such a sophisticated way that whatever specialist Tina contacted just didn’t recognize the work.”  
  
“Yeah, about _The Simpsons…_ ” Mulder held up Tina’s notebook, a page on which Mulder’s notations now joined Tina’s. “Once _The Simpsons_ stopped, something else in that den turned on…the computer.”  
  
“Okay…so there’s another timer. And?”  
  
“The computer didn’t just open to its homepage,” Mulder explained. “It opened to a Usenet forum for _The Simpsons_ —you’re familiar with Usenet?”  
  
“Well, sure…” Jeez, give her something challenging next time, Mulder. “Usenet is a precursor to the World Wide Web. Networked servers that form a discussion system.”  
  
“Right,” Mulder nodded. “So, weirdos like me can discuss alien sightings and argue over which was the better Enterprise captain, Kirk or Picard.”  
  
Scully rolled her eyes. “And discuss worldwide news and scientific advances…”  
  
“Eh,” Mulder shrugged. “Anyway, since it was open, I started looking on the _Simpsons_ forum and I figured out the pattern to the dates Tina gave us,” he held up the notebook again, “the dates where the television turned on for _The Simpsons_.”  
  
“Oh?”  
  
Mulder was grinning. Whatever it was, he was proud of himself. “The television only turned on for _first run_ episodes. Whenever it was a rerun or Fox wasn’t airing _The Simpsons_ at all, the television wouldn’t turn on.”  
  
Scully frowned as she turned over that news. “Okay, so maybe Bruce programmed his television to only turn on for first run episodes…”  
  
Mulder looked her incredulously. He stepped over to the shower so he could face her dead on. “But how, Scully? How could he do that? Fox’s programming schedule wasn’t released until _months_ after Bruce disappeared, and according to the Usenet Simpsons fans—who seem like a pretty anal set of people, so they’re probably accurate about this kind of thing—Fox changed the programming schedule _during_ the season. How do you explain that?”  
  
“Mulder,” Scully sighed, “I can think of _three_ different solutions to that, none of which involve paranormal activity.”  
  
Now Mulder looked truly incredulous. “ _Three_ —”  
  
But Mulder didn’t finish his thought, because at that moment, the shower turned on, ruining yet another Armani suit.  
  
***  
  
“‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’” Scully read aloud.  
  
Mulder, now wearing jeans and a T-shirt, snapped a picture of the foggy mirror. “Someone’s a Kubrick fan,” he commented. “Or a Stephen King fan.”  
  
“No, Kubrick,” Scully corrected her partner. “That phrase doesn’t appear in the book, just in the movie.”  
  
Mulder shot her a brilliant, surprised smile. “Scully, if looks-good-in-a-Goofy-hat-guy falls through, _I’ll_ take you to Disneyland, and we can go through It’s a Small World as many times as you want,” he said.  
  
“I think once is probably enough.”  
  
“Okay, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, then. Now…” he gestured to the words on the mirror, “care to explain how this works with your ‘delusional, lonely widow’ theory?”  
  
“Okay,” Scully admitted, “maybe it doesn’t…but,” she quickly added before Mulder’s smile could get any wider, “I still have theories that it _does_ agree with.”  
  
“Lay them on me, doc,” Mulder said, picking up a nearby pink towel to dry his still-wet hair.  
  
“First of all, making words appear on a foggy mirror is one of the oldest tricks in the book,” Scully reminded him. “You just write on the mirror before it gets foggy. The question is _who_ wrote it there.”  
  
“I’m with ya,” Mulder said, his voice slightly muffled by the pink towel that was currently draped over his face.  
  
“As far as I can tell, there are two options here. The first is Bruce. He’s sneaking into the house and ‘haunting’ it to torment his wife.”  
  
“That solution has occurred to me,” Mulder admitted, letting the pink towel fall down to his shoulders, where it hung like shawl. “But if Bruce was tampering with the wiring or plumbing, you’d think the specialists Tina called in would have noticed something. And you’d think Tina herself would have seen him at _some_ point. And that’s not even getting into the issue of motive. By all accounts Tina and Bruce were on good terms.”  
  
“‘By all accounts’ is only by Tina’s account,” Scully pointed out. “She may be omitting something—or have failed to notice something. And usually when someone’s terrorizing a woman, it’s her husband.”  
  
With his history on the Violent Crimes Section, Mulder couldn’t exactly dispute this. Still, he looked at Scully skeptically. “So, let me get this straight,” he started. “Bruce, an electrical engineer who plays a cleric in his friends’ _Dungeons & Dragons_ game and has no criminal history faked his disappearance and, instead of leaving town, is camped nearby and habitually returns to his house to write quotes from _The Shining_ on the bathroom mirror? I don’t know…” He chewed on his lower lip. “I can confirm that _The Shining_ is, in fact, in Bruce’s movie collection downstairs, but come on, Scully, is this really your theory?”  
  
“It’s _a_ theory,” Scully said, her cheeks heating up. Why did Mulder always make her feel so ridiculous for pitching an implausible-but-possible theory when his theories were almost always aliens, monsters, or vast government conspiracies? It wasn’t fair that he was right so much of the time. Still, if he didn’t like that theory, she had more. “Or it could be that someone else is doing the haunting—maybe whoever was responsible for abducting Bruce in the first place.”  
  
Maybe Mulder realized he was flustering her, so he didn’t poke holes in this second theory. “If there was someone who wanted Bruce missing for some complex plot, the police couldn’t figure out who,” Mulder informed her. “But if you want, you can talk with the police about it. Tina says Police Detective Lipinski handled the case.”  
  
“Hmm…maybe I will,” Scully murmured. “But anyway,” she announced, “there’s another possible explanation—and it’s the one I think is most likely.” She paused as Mulder looked at her expectantly. “Tina is doing the haunting.”  
  
“But why would Tina do that?” Mulder asked, removing the towel, tossing it onto the floor, and moving it around with his foot to mop up some of puddled water.  
  
“Well…” Scully picked up the towel and marched out of the room, Mulder following her, “isn’t it obvious?” She began descending the stairs to the foyer.  
  
Mulder was silent behind her. She reached the first floor, opened the door leading to the garage, and stepped in, with Mulder no longer following her. When she returned from throwing the towel in the washing machine, she found Mulder standing on the stairs, still in deep thought.  
  
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mulder,” Scully sighed, half-exasperatedly, half-admiringly, “you haven’t figured it out, yet?”  
  
He shook his head. “You mean…she’s faking a haunting for the attention?”  
  
“Not just anyone’s attention, Mulder— _your_ attention!”  
  
“ _My_ attention?” Mulder stared at Scully as if _she_ was the X-File. “What do you mean?”  
  
For an Oxford educated genius, Mulder could sure be dense sometimes. “Just look at the facts!” She held up her index finger. “Tina loses her husband. Now, I don’t know whether Bruce ran out on her or something happened to him, but in any case, he’s gone now.”  
  
Mulder nodded. “Okay, starting out with facts, good.”  
  
“Then,” Scully held up another finger, “suddenly she’s alone again—maybe months go by and she decides she would like to be in a relationship again.”  
  
“Not really a fact,” Mulder pointed out, “but continue.”  
  
“So, she thinks to herself, ‘Hey, remember that Fox Mulder guy I used to know? He was handsome. I wonder what he’s up to?’”  
  
“I think we’re off in the land of complete speculation now,” Mulder interposed, “but you called me handsome, so I’ll allow it.”  
  
“And she finds out that you investigate paranormal activity and—” She trailed off when Mulder started laughing. “What?” She placed her hands on her hips. “Maybe it sounds far-fetched, but it’s _possible,_ which is more than can be said of whatever theory you’re cooking up in that head of yours.”  
  
“Scully, Scully, Scully,” he shook his head, “I want you to keep in mind that the words you are about to hear are coming from a man who spends a lot of time with the Lone Gunmen…” he placed his hands on her shoulders and hunched down a little bit so he could look her square in the eyes. “That is the most paranoid thing I have ever heard!”  
  
Scully shook out of his grasp. “Is it?” she demanded. “We weren’t even here for a minute, _Fox,_ before she complimented you on your appearance—she hasn’t seen you for _fifteen years_ but she remembers your favorite drink and _makes it for you_ —”  
  
“Now just wait a minute!” Mulder was still laughing. “She complimented _you_ too, if you remember. Unless,” he looked at her with mock-shock as if an idea had just occurred to him, “Scully, you don’t think she staged this elaborate set up so she could meet _you,_ do you?”  
  
Scully glared at him and folded her arms across her chest. “Fine, laugh it up and do some ghost busting. But it was a _real, physical_ person who wrote on this mirror and hooked up that game system. I’m going to stay in the realm of the _possible_ and we’ll see who can crack this case first.”  
  
Mulder flashed her an intrigued look. “Scully, are you proposing a competition?”  
  
She jutted her chin out. “I think I am. You investigate your theories—I’ll investigate my theories—and whoever’s right, wins.”  
  
“The stakes?”  
  
“The loser needs to justify to Skinner why we wasted our time on a personal case.” She paused. “And buy the other one dinner, since you ruined my Valentine’s Day plans.”  
  
Mulder wisely refrained from pointing out that Scully hadn’t had any Valentine’s Day plans in the first place. He extended his hand, and the two shook on it.


	3. Separation

“I don’t understand…you two are partners?” Tina asked. “But you’re competing?”  
  
Mulder shrugged and grinned an easy grin. “We have different perspectives on this case. And since it seems pretty…” he chose his words carefully, “non-dangerous, we thought it might be an illuminating experience to pursue our different methods separately this time...for a change of pace.”  
  
Tina and Mulder were standing in the hall bathroom, with Tina holding a wooden hanger on which Mulder’s damp suit jacket hung. Mulder had dabbed it dry to the best of his ability, and he was stuffing the sleeves with crumpled newspaper so the suit would maintain its shape when it air-dried. He was sadly knowledgeable about what to do with suits that got soaked in the line of duty.  
  
Tina studied Mulder shrewdly. “She thinks I’m crazy, doesn’t she?” she guessed.  
  
“No—no!” Mulder exclaimed a little too quickly. “Not crazy. No.” He moved onto the other sleeve, crumpling the classified ads. “She’s just less inclined than I am to credit paranormal sources.”  
  
“So, she thinks I’m making it up?”  
  
“I don’t think she’s rendered her judgment yet,” Mulder said, sidestepping the question. “But let me put it this way: she doesn’t think it’s a ghost.”  
  
“But you do?’  
  
Mulder paused for a moment. “I think the phenomena I have witnessed point to some spiritual energy, yes. What is human life but electrical impulses? And when someone passes away, those impulses have to go _somewhere_.”  
  
“But Bruce didn’t die—” Tina stiffened and blinked a few times, “he didn’t disappear _here_. The last witness who admits to seeing him was the stewardess. That was just after his plane landed, and he called me on his cell phone. Or I called him—we called each other at the same time…” she sighed and blinked a few more times, ducking her face behind the suit jacket. “I’m babbling. But if he—if he wasn’t here, how would his ‘energy’ arrive here?”  
  
“You’re thinking in terms of _our_ plane of existence. But Bruce could be on a different plane—the rules that we know might not apply to him.”  
  
Her face emerged from behind the suit jacket. Her eyes looked slightly red. “Is this your way of telling me he’s dead?”  
  
Again, Mulder sidestepped the question. “All of the phenomena you have described can be connected to Bruce. Lights and appliances tend to turn on more on weekends, when he would typically be at the house more often. The shower generally turns on at the time Bruce would have used it. The television switches on for programs that Bruce would have watched. Appliances that Bruce didn’t use—like your bread maker or food processor—haven’t been affected. That can’t be a coincidence.”  
  
Tina let out a harsh laugh and hid her head behind the suit jacket again. “If you had told me this a year ago, I would have called you certifiable. But after the year I’ve had…” her head poked out from behind the jacket once more, “I’m ready to believe anything.”  
  
***  
  
Scully sat on the floor of the master bedroom, and leaned over so she could see the shoebox under the bed.  
  
Shoeboxes under the bed…for such an accessible place, it was funny that that was often where people kept their most intimate, revealing objects. Her grandmother’s shoebox had contained love letters (written by a man other than her grandfather). Her mother’s shoebox, she knew, contained old family photos. And Scully’s shoebox?  
  
Well, never mind her shoebox.  
  
So, Scully wondered what would be in the shoebox Tina had beneath her bed. What deep, intimate secret about Tina did that box contain?  
  
And should she look? Tina had implicitly given her and Mulder free run of the house—and she had explicitly assigned Scully to this room. They had been asked to investigate. Did that investigation extend to shoeboxes under beds?  
  
Somehow, she thought not. And yet, it would be a shame to miss out on a vital clue—what if the box was actually Bruce’s, and contained some clue to his whereabouts?  
  
A knock sounded at the door, and Scully shot up. “Come in!” she yelped.  
  
It was Tina—dressed in a robe. “I’m about to turn in, Agent Scully,” she told her. “Is there anything you need?”  
  
Scully shook her head. “Um—no—no, thanks, I’m fine.”  
  
Tina looked her curiously, but let it go. “I have an early shift tomorrow, so you probably won’t see me until later. And I brought some chicken picante from the restaurant—it’s in the refrigerator, so feel free to heat it up when you get hungry. There’s cheesecake, too.”  
  
“Thank you,” Scully replied, just now realizing how hungry she was.  
  
“Oh, and here…” Tina handed her a folder. “Here are photocopies I made of my notes for you…I had some handy because I tried giving them to the police, and I thought you might find them useful. Fox says you two are investigating separately…?”  
  
Suddenly her and Mulder’s proposition seemed incredibly childish. She could feel her cheeks heat up. “Thanks…” she thumbed through the folder to find Tina’s notes, plumbing and electrical invoices, and some transcripts from the police station. “It’s just—sometimes Agent Mulder and I come at things from different angles and…”  
  
Tina held up her hand. “As long as you figure out what’s going on, I don’t care how you do it.” She stepped back into the hallway, “I know this isn’t as high profile or exciting as the cases you normally work on, and I really appreciate all your help. Good night.”  
  
She shut the door before Scully had a chance to respond.  
  
Scully thought about the shoebox underneath the bed, and decided to leave it there. She had no reason to think it was connected to the case. If it had been important, Tina would have mentioned it. And if it was incriminating, she wouldn’t have left it within Scully’s easy access. Rifling the possessions of a grieving widow—it was hard to imagine how she could sink lower.  
  
But then she heard some laughter coming from downstairs—Tina and Mulder. And she jumped to the floor, yanked out the shoebox, and opened it to find—  
  
“Shoes?” she exclaimed. A tan pair of wedge-heeled shoes. Who kept shoes in a shoebox under their bed?  
  
She disgustedly shoved the shoebox back under the bed, almost hitting the cat, and decided it was time to call it a day. She quickly showered (the water spontaneously turned off twice during the shower, and the lights turned off once) and brushed her teeth (no incidents). Then she crawled into bed and switched on the bedside reading light, intending to read the documents Tina had given her. But no sooner had she switched the light on, then it turned off again.  
  
She switched the light back on.  
  
It turned back off.  
  
She turned it back on.  
  
It turned back off.  
  
Okay, fine. She moved to the other side of the bed and switched on the light on that side. It stayed on…for a couple of seconds, and then switched back off.  
  
She fell back into the pillows. “Just great,” she groaned.  
  
***  
  
Mulder woke up to the sound of fighting. Yelps and grunts—faint but unmistakable. What was going on?  
  
He lurched from the couch and yelled for Scully before falling to the floor, tripping on some wires.  
  
“Ugh…” he groaned.  
  
The fighting sounds continued, but Mulder soon realized they sounded sort of…fake. He lifted his head and discovered the source of the sounds: the television was on. Had he left it on? He’d been watching _Planet of the Apes_ and—no, he’d definitely turned it off before falling asleep, because he remembered he’d had to use three different remotes to finally find the damn off-button. Scully was right about one thing: Bruce’s electronics system was complicated.  
  
He sat up and studied the screen—it was some video game, judging from the health meter on the upper left corner. An elf creature fighting some rhinoceros-dragon creature by a volcano. It was hard to tell what it was, exactly. The graphics were pretty chunky.  
  
Mulder spotted the game system on the floor, close to his feet. He’d tripped over the controller…  
  
“You should be more careful with your stuff,” he said in case the ghost was listening. “I could have stepped on it, and I don’t know how a ghost is going to buy a new…” he looked at the system’s label, “Nintendo 64.” He picked up the controller, sat back on the couch, and hit a few of the controller’s buttons until a menu pulled up. Then he selected “LOAD GAME.”  
  
He scrolled through the save files and whistled. “Ghost, you’ve been busy.” There was a new save file every few days starting two weeks ago. According to the game, someone had played 30 hours within the last two weeks.  
  
He grinned to himself. And Scully thought this was all some elaborate plan of Tina’s to seduce him—somehow he couldn’t imagine Tina playing 30 hours of some video game. No, this had Bruce’s ghost written all over it.  
  
***  
  
“I don’t know what to tell you, Agent Scully,” Police Detective Lipinski sighed. “You’re welcome to look through the file, of course, but Bruce Speta’s disappearance is as much as mystery today as it was back in July. And I have no idea what to make of these so-called hauntings.”  
  
Lipinski handed Scully the file, which Lipinski had just extracted from the file cabinet in her office. The office was small, with very few personal belongings, and absolutely no trash. It had the look of a room that was rarely occupied. That made sense, because with her tanned skin and weather-beaten face, Lipinski had the look of someone who spent as much time outside as possible.  
  
“Thank you…” Scully flipped through the file. Phone records, employment history, some witness statements—more or less what she’d expected. “Was there anything at all to suggest Bruce Speta may have disappeared intentionally?”  
  
“Not that we could turn up…” Lipinski sighed and clicked her teeth together a few times. “So, this guy Speta spends the week at some engineering conference in Seattle, right? Then he flies home. We know he made the flight home because his ticket was scanned and we have witnesses who say he was on the plane. Phone records show he spoke with his wife right after landing, and we can see that he sent her a few text messages. And here’s one point that’s always bothered me…” She leaned in and lowered her voice, as if someone was listening in. “His luggage.”  
  
“His luggage?” When Mulder had given her a run through Bruce Speta’s disappearance on the plane trip out to Columbus, he hadn’t mentioned anything about luggage.  
  
Lipinski nodded. She took the file from Scully’s hands and extracted a photo of a suitcase with a camouflage pattern. “This,” she held up the photo, “is Bruce Speta’s suitcase. We found it in the airport’s room of unclaimed luggage. But…” she next extracted the phone records, “this guy Bruce sent a message to his wife claiming that he had picked up his suitcase. He even specified that it was the suitcase with the camouflage pattern.”  
  
Scully frowned and read the text message records. Yes, there it was right there: ‘C my camouflage bag rolling 2 me. It foolishly thought it could hide. B there soon.’ “If the airport staff found an unattended bag,” she asked, “what would be their procedure?”  
  
“They’re _supposed to_ treat it like a potential bomb threat,” Lipinski answered. “That’s what everyone I spoke to said they would do in that situation. If a bag is in the unclaimed luggage room, that means it was still on the carousel in baggage claim, not that someone found the bag somewhere.”  
  
“So, it looks like…” Scully said slowly, “either Bruce picked up the bag and was attacked at _that_ point, and then the attacker put the bag back on the carousel…or Bruce was attacked earlier than that, and someone _else_ was sending these messages through his phone. Or Bruce intentionally disappeared…”  
  
“But if he intentionally disappeared, why fly to Columbus?” Lipinski demanded. “And even if he _had_ to go to Columbus for some reason, why leave your bag behind?”  
  
“To make it look like something happened to him?” Scully suggested.  
  
“Then why send the text messages saying he picked up the bag? I don’t know, Agent Scully…” she shook her head. “Frankly, it was a relief when I was ordered to close this file. I wasn’t making any progress on it. And I couldn’t sit through any more meetings with plumbers and electricians telling me the same thing—that they were just as clueless as I was. If you _do_ find out what happened,” Lipinski used a tone that made it clear she thought any progress was unlikely, “be sure to let me know. It’ll save me a few sleepless nights.”  
  
Just as Scully was about to stand up, Lipinski remembered something.  
  
“One more thing—as long as you’re here—” She rummaged around in a desk drawer, and pulled out a large Ziploc bag with a Nokia and charger inside. “Ms. Walters-Speta keeps forgetting to drop by to pick this up. Could you give this to her?”  
  
Scully took it.  
  
“We took the phone to check up on those text messages,” Lipinski explained. “She’s never asked for it back, but we don’t need it anymore.”  
  
Scully studied the black Nokia cell phone. It was the same model as hers, though she admitted hers had more dings and scratches. Tina probably wasn’t running through the woods with hers while chasing after Mulder chasing after an alleged swamp monster.  
  
The other respect in which Tina’s cell phone differed from hers was a ridge on the side—an extra half-inch bump over which someone had fastened a metal plate.  
  
Lipinski noticed her studying the extra feature. “That’s Bruce’s handiwork,” Lipinski told her. “His wife said that the day they got those phones, he took them apart and put them back together, like a kid with a puzzle. Did something to soup them up—to get better reception, apparently. I guess he tinkered with all their electronics.” She shook her head. “That guy needed a hobby.”  
  
Privately, Scully thought that tinkering with electronics qualified as a hobby, but she just thanked Lipinski and asked her for directions to her next stops: the airport, and then Hartman Engineering Solutions, Bruce’s place of employment.  
  
***  
  
Mulder woke up to an empty house and two notes on the table by the couch. The first was written on daisy-patterned stationary: “Fox—went to work. Call me if you have any questions. Lunch for you and Dana is in the fridge. See you later tonight and thanks again, Tina.”  
  
The second note was on a piece of paper he guessed was ripped from the notebook Tina had given him. It was considerably shorter than Tina’s note: “Took car.” Scully didn’t bother signing her name. He and Scully were beyond the stage in their relationship where they needed to identify themselves to each other.  
  
So, Scully had taken the car…probably to speak with the police or maybe visit Hartman Engineering Solutions.  
  
She was wasting time.  
  
“Okay, Bruce,” Mulder said to an empty house, “it’s just you and me now.” He paused. “Show yourself.”  
  
Nothing happened. Well, it had been worth a try.  
  
There must be something he could do to provoke a reaction from the ghost.  
  
He sauntered over to the movie collection and scanned it.  
  
“I see you have the special edition of _Star Wars_ , Bruce,” he called. “I heard George Lucas made some changes to the movies…you don’t happen to have any strong feelings about them that you’d like to communicate, do you?”  
  
Silence. No flickering lights. No electronics switching on.  
  
“You know what my favorite scene in _Star Wars_ is?” Mulder asked. “That scene where Spock sacrifices himself.” He waited.  
  
Nothing.  
  
One more try…if there was one call that should provoke a response from a guy like Bruce, Mulder bet he knew what it was, thanks to his recent excursion on Usenet.  
  
“Dental plan!” Mulder called.  
  
Nothing.  
  
So, either Bruce couldn’t hear him, Bruce couldn’t communicate with him, or Bruce had grown beyond caring about the cultural touchstones of nerds in the 20th century.  
  
Mulder briefly considered trying an Ouija board, but even Mulder was skeptical that the divide between two planes of existence could be breached by a device trademarked and manufactured by Hasbro. And anyway, a piece of cardboard and a plastic triangle seemed a little low-tech for a person like Bruce. Maybe that was the problem…  
  
“Okay, Bruce, let’s try this…” Mulder sat back down on the couch and pressed the power button on the Nintendo 64 still hooked up to the television. Then he grabbed the three television remotes and pressed about twelve buttons before _The Legend of Zelda_ start screen illuminated the screen. “Why yes, I _would_ like to load a game…” Mulder murmured. “But first, I think I’m going to go through and delete all other save files…” He did so. “Now I’m going to load the most recent one and…” he waited for the game to load, “oh look, it’s a big boss battle…too bad I don’t know what I’m doing…looks like my character has some health potions…why don’t I just go ahead and use all of them right now…”  
  
He was thankful Scully was out on her dead-end investigation. If she walked in and saw him “investigating” a case by playing a video game, she might roll her eyes so hard they popped out of her skull.  
  
“Oh no!” Mulder exclaimed in mock distress, smiling gleefully. “It looks like I just lost a heart on my health meter! Boy, am I bad at this!”  
  
***  
  
The airport and Hartman Engineering Solutions had been a waste of time, Scully admitted as she turned the key in the ignition of the rental car.  
  
None of the crew from Bruce’s flight had been there, nor had the employees supervising the unclaimed luggage room the day of the disappearance. The staff she did speak with just confirmed what Detective Lipinski had already told her: security footage pulled up nothing, and they couldn’t explain the disappearance. She spoke with a security guard who had told Tina to move her parked car on the day of Bruce’s disappearance, and his account matched Tina’s account exactly.  
  
Hartman Engineering Solutions hadn’t been much better. The only worthwhile thing she had done there was charge Tina’s old cell phone. Her questions with the employees had given her no new information. Bruce had been a model employee. Hardworking, genial, level-headed. He had a little bit of an issue with tardiness, but had always stayed late to make up for it.  
  
Though his coworkers were sober-faced for most of the interview, they had laughed a little when she’d asked if he’d had any enemies, and they assured her that the only enemies he had were orcs and minotaurs from his _Dungeons & Dragons_ game. A couple of Hartman employees had also been members of his _Dungeons & Dragons_ group, and they informed her that Bruce had led a non-dangerous, non-threatening personal life.  
  
“We were all shocked when we found out he’d gone missing,” an engineer named Chet told her. “It must have been some random attack—no one would target Bruce specifically. He was a nice guy. He was so _normal_.”  
  
The other engineers nodded emphatically at this. The meeting ended the same way Scully’s interview with Detective Lipinski had: with them asking Scully to please let them know if her investigation turned up anything.  
  
Scully drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. Considering the Hartman employees were preparing to leave the office for the day, maybe Scully should find a park to pull into so she could finally eat that lunch Tina had packed her.  
  
She sighed. She wished Tina hadn’t made her lunch. The more dead-ends she reached when investigating Bruce, the likelier it was that her theory about Tina was right. So why did Tina have to be so darn _nice?_  
  
Maybe that was why she had put off eating that salad that Tina had made for her. Guilt.  
  
Or suspicion—maybe the salad was poisoned.  
  
“Mulder’s right,” she groaned, resolving to stop the car at the next opportunity. “I am paranoid.”  
  
She pulled into a park about twenty minutes away from the airport. It was as bleak as a park in an Ohio February generally was…grayish-green grass, bare trees, and unoccupied playground equipment. The ground looked muddy, and Scully decided to stay in the car.  
  
In between bites of romaine lettuce, she switched on Tina’s newly charged phone. No surprise—it looked like service had been cut off, but the locally stored information was still there. She navigated through the text messages to find they agreed with what she had been told.  
  
Next, she scrolled through the contacts list. Bruce was at the very top. She didn’t recognize most of the names (why would she?) but she saw some contacts she knew…the restaurant where Tina worked, and a few of the people she’d met today at Hartman. Some people who were probably family members, judging from their last names. She noted with a queer sense of satisfaction that there was no entry labeled “Mulder, Fox.”  
  
She scrolled back to the top of the contacts list, and selected “Speta, Bruce,” intending to pull up Tina’s call history with him.  
  
And then things got strange.  
  
First, rather than bringing up contact information or a call log, it seems that Scully had accidentally pressed the “call” button. Second, at that moment, the cell’s ringtone went off, and the words “Incoming call from Speta, Bruce” flashed across the screen. Scully nearly dropped the phone (she did drop the fork she’d been using to spear a grape tomato) and, her heart hammering, selected “accept.”  
  
“Hello?” she said, her voice shaky.  
  
There was static on the other end—a lot of static. But there was also a voice—a man’s voice she didn’t recognize.  
  
“Tina?” he called. “Tina, is that you?”  
  
“This is Special Agent Scully of the FBI,” Scully identified herself. “I’m investigating a case for Tina. Is this Bruce Speta?”  
  
There were a few seconds of static—just static. Then the man began talking again. “FBI?” he yelped. “What’s going on? Is Tina there?”  
  
“No, she’s not—will you please identify yourself?”  
  
“Where is she?” the man asked, his voice sounding frantic. “If you’ve done something to her, I—I—I’m calling the police!”  
  
And then the call disconnected.  
  
Scully tried dialing, but she got a busy signal.  
  
Bruce—it had to be Bruce.  
  
But why had he thought something had happened to Tina? And why had the cell phone even worked? Tina had no doubt obtained a new cell phone by now…  
  
Scully grabbed her phone and selected “Mulder, Fox.” The phone rang once, and then Mulder picked up, greeting her with, “Hey.”  
  
“Mulder, it’s me,” she said. “Listen, something strange has happened—”  
  
“—are you okay?” he asked, sounding concerned.  
  
“I’m fine,” she assured him. “I took your advice and went to see Detective Lipinski this morning, and she gave me Tina’s cell phone. And I just used it to speak with Bruce.”  
  
Mulder didn’t say anything for several seconds. Maybe he was just that shocked that his ghost theory was scuttled. Then finally, his soft voice came through. “Scully,” he said slowly, “what are you talking about?”  
  
Was he really _that_ attached to his ghost theory? “Bruce is alive, Mulder,” Scully explained. “He picked up his phone. Or…” she clarified, “he didn’t specifically identify himself as Bruce, but he was calling from Bruce’s number so he must have—”  
  
“Who is Bruce?” Mulder demanded. “I thought you were at the dentist’s.”  
  
What? “Mulder…” she had to take a moment to think of what to say. What was going on with him? Had he broken into Tina’s liquor cabinet? “I canceled my dentist’s appointment when you booked our tickets to Columbus—are you feeling okay?”  
  
“You’re in Columbus? As in, Ohio?”  
  
“…you’re not in Columbus?”  
  
“No…” Mulder paused. “Scully, I think we just won the prize for the strangest phone conversation…” He paused again. “Are you an alien bounty hunter?”  
  
“No!”  
  
“You’d tell me if you were?”  
  
One of these days, they really needed to come up with a code phrase to identify if they were really who they said they were. You’d think with all their run-ins with imposters, they would have gotten around to that, but it always seemed to slip their minds.  
  
Anyway, it was too late for that now. “Mulder, are you saying you’re in Washington, D.C.?”  
  
“Scully, are you saying you’re _not_ in Washington, D.C.?”  
  
Scully chewed on her lower lip. If Mulder was in Washington, D.C., who was the man who’d spent the night sleeping on Tina’s couch?  
  
“Do you know a woman named Tina Walters-Speta?” she asked.  
  
Again, Mulder needed a few seconds to generate words. “Is it lonely out there in left field, Scully?”  
  
“Just answer the question!” she snapped.  
  
“Okay, okay…yeah—at least, I know someone named Tina Walters. Our families ran in the same circle. I presume that’s who you mean?”  
  
“How would you describe her?”  
  
“Physically? About your height, a short nose, dark, curly hair—cute, I guess—on the chubby side. I haven’t seen her in a while. Clearly, if she’s married, now.”  
  
“And her personality?”  
  
“Nice, friendly. A great cook—a professional chef, but the last time I saw her, her talents were being wasted at this dive in Bethesda. Sort of a people-pleaser. I could tell she thought I was a weirdo, but she never said so. My mom tried to set us up once but,” she could hear Mulder’s leer over the phone, “I like a woman who’s not afraid to openly question my sanity. Anyway,” he concluded his description, “she was a sweet girl. Any other profiles of Mulder family acquaintances you want, while you’re at it?”  
  
“And you don’t know someone named Bruce Speta?”  
  
“Can’t say that I do. Scully, will you _please_ let me know what’s going on?” Beneath Mulder’s confusion, there was a clear strain of fear.  
  
“I just—I need to check something, Mulder. Don’t worry—I’m not in any danger—I just—I’ll give you a call back.” She hung up the phone and turned the car on.  
  
Was what she had told Mulder true? _Was_ she in danger right now? Maybe instead of driving to Tina’s house alone, she should call Detective Lipinski for backup, or even wait until Mulder could make it out to Columbus.  
  
But the Mulder she’d been traveling with had seemed _so much_ like Mulder. She thought back to the previous imposters: that alien bounty hunter and Eddie van Blundht. She had been fooled by both of them (more so by the latter than by the former), but even with van Blundht, she’d had _some_ suspicions. _Something_ had seemed off. But the Mulder she’d been with at Tina’s house had seemed completely in character: excited about the possibility of the paranormal, exasperated that she kept trying to push him back into the realm of the possible, and just a little bit flirty.  
  
And the Mulder she’d spoken to just now? That one sounded like her Mulder, too.  
  
So, which one was the real one?  
  
A very Mulder-type explanation was beginning to hatch in her brain.  
  
“No,” she murmured to herself. “That’s not possible.” She shook her head, as if that would shake the theory away. But it wouldn’t go away.  
  
What if they were both the real Mulder?  
  
What if everything that everyone had told her was true?


	4. Reunion

It was a little past 6 pm when she pulled up to Tina’s house. Most of the lights were on, so she decided to rap on the door rather than using the key Tina had given her. She heard some footsteps, and her hand hovered over her gun.  
  
Someone cracked the door open. “Who is it?” a man’s voice asked. Definitely not Mulder’s voice.  
  
She pulled out her badge. “I’m Special Agent Dana Scully with the FBI,” she announced. “I believe we spoke on the phone earlier today.”  
  
“You!” The door slammed shut and she heard the lock click. “What did you do with Tina?” the man asked, his voice now muffled by the closed door.  
  
“I didn’t do _anything_ with her, Mr. Speta,” Scully assured him. “You are Bruce Speta, aren’t you?”  
  
“Of course I’m Bruce Speta!” he exclaimed. “Now what have you done with my wife?”  
  
“I haven’t done anything with her,” Scully reiterated. “I’m an FBI agent and I’m investigating the disappearance.” She carefully avoided stating whose disappearance she was investigating.  
  
“You are?” The lock clicked, and the door swung open to reveal—yes, the man from the Disneyland photograph. He looked considerably pastier and had dark circles under his eyes, but it was unmistakably the same man. “Detective Lipinski said the file was closed. They reopened it?”  
  
“My partner at the FBI knows Tina, and he wanted to look into it,” Scully told him, which was true. “His name is Fox Mulder—has Tina ever mentioned him?”  
  
“Fox—what kind of name is Fox?” Bruce frowned, but his shoulders had loosened.  
  
Scully ignored the question. She wouldn’t know how to answer it, anyway. “Mr. Speta, may I come inside?” she asked.  
  
Bruce stepped aside and ushered her in. “Yep—yep. Come in.”  
  
He closed the door behind them, and led Scully to the same rose-patterned sofa Tina had led her and Mulder to just the day before. And yet, the living room didn’t look exactly the same—it was messier, with opened books lying on the tables, some clumps of orange cat fur visible on the white carpet, and a bag of Cheez-its adorning the fireplace mantle.  
  
And judging from the circles decorating the coffee table, Bruce didn’t seem to be as observant as Tina was about using coasters.  
  
“You said your partner was named Mulder?” Bruce was considering this. “You know, I think Tina did mention that family once or twice. Dad had some government job, the daughter went missing, and the son’s sort of a whack-a-doodle—” He winced. “Sorry—I didn’t mean that—I must have gotten it confused with some other family—”  
  
“No,” Scully held back her smile, “that’s them, all right.”  
  
“Er…” Bruce paced a bit before sitting in the glider chair. “So where is your partner, then?”  
  
“That’s an interesting question, Mr. Speta,” Scully replied. “There’s no easy answer.” She took a deep breath and wondered how to explain this—she could barely understand it herself. “Mr. Speta,” she began, “am I right in assuming that your wife went missing back in July?”  
  
Bruce nodded. “Yep. I’d just gotten back from Seattle. She was supposed to pick me up at the airport. I even spoke to her on the phone, and she said she was there. But…” he shrugged and let out a sad sigh, “I never saw her. Eventually I took a cab home and hoped she’d be here, but she wasn’t.”  
  
“And since then, you’ve experienced some hauntings here?”  
  
“Hauntings?” Bruce’s eyes bulged, and then he started laughing nervously. “I wouldn’t call them hauntings! I mean—yep, it’s been strange here. The electric has been on the fritz but…” he sighed again. “To tell you the truth, Agent Scully, I’ve tinkered with the electric system all over this house. Um…” he cringed, “please don’t tell the village about that. I’m an electrical engineer, and tinkering has always been my hobby. But I guess since Tina left or—or whatever, I’ve just…lost my touch.”  
  
“You think your wiring has been faulty?”  
  
“Well, how else would you explain it?”  
  
As if on cue, the lights turned off. Bruce gave a weary sigh, and his dim outline trudged over to the wall and flipped the lights back on again.  
  
“There was a period after Tina disappeared where I drank a little too much,” Bruce admitted. “I must have done a number on the wiring then, because ever since then it’s been on-and-off, on-and-off…and weird stuff, too, like on 9:00 on Mondays, the TV always turns on for _Ally McBeal_. I don’t know _what_ I did there!”  
  
“Anything else?”  
  
“Well, sure!” Bruce sat back down on the glider and leaned forward. He seemed eager to talk about this. Perhaps she was the first person he was telling. “Sometimes the appliances go—like, the breadmaker, which is weird because I don’t remember even _touching_ the breadmaker. And the plumbing has been acting screwy too—only I wouldn’t have done anything with that. So sometimes I think…” he looked down at his hands, which he was clasping together, “sometimes I think I’m imagining it—or maybe doing it. Like, maybe I just _want_ Tina to be back so bad that I’m using the breadmaker myself and sort of forgetting it so I can convince myself just for a second that she’s still here. Or I’m switching on the shower late at night, when Tina would take her shower. You know?”  
  
It wasn’t often Scully discussed these sorts of topics with suspects on cases, because Mulder would usually take over now. But Mulder wasn’t here, clearly, so she would have to do. “You think you’ve been going into a sort of…trance and living as your wife?”  
  
Maybe her wording hadn’t been the best there, because Bruce jolted up. “I’m not Norman Bates, or anything!” he insisted.  
  
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean—”  
  
“I’m not putting on her dresses or acting like her or—”  
  
“No, I wasn’t suggesting—”  
  
“I’m just—maybe I’m turning the shower on and forgetting. That’s it. Because…” he sighed, “the TV’s not turning on for _my_ shows and the electric appliances or devices _I_ use aren’t turning on. Like the computer—that’s never turned on. And Tina never used it. Therefore…” he waved his hand as if leading Scully to the proper conclusion, “it’s gotta be me fooling myself into thinking Tina’s still around. I actually…” he scratched his neck, “I actually made an appointment with a therapist. I made a few appointments, actually…I just keep on chickening out on them. But I swear I’m gonna start going…” He sighed and looked Scully in the eye. “Do you think I’m crazy?”  
  
Scully shook her head. “No, Mr. Speta, I don’t think you’re crazy. But…” now it was her turn to sigh, “you might think I’m crazy after what I have to tell you.”  
  
***  
  
Maybe it was Bruce’s steady diet of science fiction, but he actually understood Scully’s alternate-reality explanation much faster than she would have thought possible.  
  
Did he believe it? No. But he understood it.  
  
“So, on July 7th,” Bruce stated, “reality split in two alternate realities in which the only difference was that I went into one reality and Tina went into another reality?”  
  
“I guess it’s possible there are more differences between the realities,” Scully admitted, “but for now, that’s the only one we’ve identified.”  
  
“Uh-huh…” Bruce looked at her skeptically, clearly thinking she was just as whack-a-doodle as her partner. “And even though Tina and I are in different realities, for some reason some things carry over between the two realities…predominately utilities, as it seems…”  
  
“Yes…” Scully agreed reluctantly. God, this was insane.  
  
Bruce stood up and started pacing. “So, when a light turns on, that’s because Tina is in the other reality, turning that light on?”  
  
“Right…”  
  
“Okay, let’s say just for the sake of argument that that’s true…why is the FBI investigating _my_ disappearance in Tina’s reality, but in _my_ reality, the FBI is twiddling their thumbs in Washington, D.C.?”  
  
“Because,” Scully explained, “the only reason we started investigating this case is because Tina specifically asked us to. You didn’t know Mulder, and you’ve been keeping these strange phenomena a secret instead of reporting them, like Tina did.”  
  
Bruce disappeared into the hall, but his voice carried. “So, you’re saying that in the reality we’re in right now, there is some other version of you and your partner?”  
  
“I’ve spoken with my partner, so I can confirm that,” Scully said. “He made it sound like there was another Dana Scully…getting her teeth cleaned at the dentist.”  
  
“Oh, well, that’s good for her.” Bruce returned, swigging from a bottle of Guinness. “I’m sorry Agent Scully, but this—this is crazy.”  
  
“I know,” Scully admitted.  
  
Bruce spat up some of the Guinness. “You—you _know_ it’s crazy?”  
  
Scully reclined her head onto the couch and closed her eyes. “Of course it’s crazy. Alternate realities? What is this, _Star Wars_?”  
  
“More _Star Trek_ , really…” Bruce murmured, taking another swig.  
  
Scully ignored the correction. “It’s the kind of crazy theory Mulder would come up with. But seeing what I’ve seen—I just don’t know how else to explain it. God, I wish Mulder was here…”  
  
“Well…” Bruce said slowly, “he is here, isn’t he?”  
  
Scully looked at him curiously.  
  
“You said yourself that you’d spoken with him,” Bruce reminded her. “Maybe it’s not _your_ Agent Mulder, but it’s still _a_ Mulder, isn’t it?”  
  
***  
  
To her surprise, Bruce did not encourage her to find a nice hotel somewhere. The guest bedroom was hers, although she heard Bruce locking the door to the master bedroom after he entered it. Before he had closed the door, she spotted the camouflage luggage poking out under the bed. So, it looked like the suitcase had made it home in this reality.  
  
She really couldn’t blame Bruce for being wary of her. Given the circumstances, Bruce had been a very good sport. Maybe he was just a nice person, or maybe it was because that as crazy as Scully’s theory was, at least it involved his wife being alive. Additionally, her knowledge that Bruce had written quotes from _The Shining_ on his own mirror had impressed him.  
  
“Yep…I wrote those,” Bruce had told her, giving her a strange look. “It was a dumb joke—because it sorta felt like I was being haunted and—how did you know about that?”  
  
Since there was only one way she _could_ have known that, after she revealed that information, he seemed little more inclined to give credence to her claims.  
  
She woke early in the morning. She walked into the den half expecting to find Mulder curled up on the couch. Instead Bruce was there, a video game controller in his hands and profanity on your lips.  
  
He glanced at her when she entered. “Is your partner the kind of guy who would delete a guy’s save files and then blow all of the red potions and bombs he’s been acquiring?”  
  
“Um…” She didn’t know what that even meant. But somehow, she was sure that yes, this had been Mulder’s handiwork.  
  
“Oh, forget it…I’ve gotta call in sick, anyway…” Bruce took his strangely shaped Nokia into the other room, and she heard him announce in a theatrically raspy voice that he didn’t think he could make it into the office today.  
  
A couple hours passed uneventfully, with Scully making notes in a notebook, and Bruce swapping out cartridge after cartridge, discovering that someone had ruined his save files for every game, either deleting his save files, or overwriting them after discarding Bruce’s entire inventory. These new save files were often given charming names like “HAHA” and “GHOSTBUSTER.”  
  
Occasionally, Bruce would stop what he was doing to ask Scully a question, generally about how Tina was doing (Did she seem happy? Had she started dating again?) or clarification about the supposed hauntings (Had the television turned on _every_ time he used it? Like, _every_ time?). Given the urgency with which Bruce asked that last question, reading between the lines, Scully would guess that he had been watching porn.  
  
She’d been away from Mulder for less than a day, but she really missed him. A few times, she even started flipping the light switch on and off, just because she knew that in some other reality, she was driving Mulder crazy.  
  
And then at about 8:45, there was a knock at the door. Bruce dashed to it. Scully followed him at a slower pace, but her heart was racing. When she reached the door, Bruce was peering through the peephole.  
  
“Does your partner have a giant nose and look sorta tired?” Bruce asked.  
  
“That’s him,” Scully nodded.  
  
Bruce opened the door, and there was Mulder standing there.  
  
Mulder cleared his throat. “Hello…” he said, wearing his typical sedate expression, “you must be Bruce Speta.” He shook Bruce’s hand. Mulder turned to Scully, and a smile twitched at his lips. “And you must be Special Agent Scully. I’ve brought someone I think you’ll have a lot in common with…” He nodded to someone off to the side, and Scully knew immediately who it must be.  
  
Her doppelganger stepped into the doorway. They looked identical, except that, of course, her doppelganger had whiter teeth.  
  
“Special Agent Dana Scully,” the woman said, flashing her badge. Considering they were the same height, she did a remarkably good job of looking down her nose at Scully. “And you are…?”  
  
Bruce’s eyes flashed back and forth between the two Scullys. “Okay,” he said, “maybe there’s something in this alternate reality theory after all…”  
  
***  
  
“…and that’s what I think happened…” Scully said. “I know it sounds crazy—”  
  
The other Scully snorted.  
  
“—but I can’t think of any other explanation for what I’ve seen,” she finished.  
  
Bruce hadn’t been able to stop swiveling his head back and forth between the two Scullys. Mulder, on the other hand, had been staring at her the entire time intently, brushing his lower lip with his thumbnail. Meanwhile, the other Scully had been looking blandly—and unconvincingly—uninterested. Perhaps her expression could best be described as “imperious,” although every time Scully had directly addressed Mulder, the other Scully had shot her a sour expression.  
  
“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Scully admitted. “Maybe we should give you a moment to discuss it…”  
  
“Yes,” the other Scully finally said, “maybe you should.”  
  
Bruce shot to his feet and announced in a voice about twice as loud as it had to be, “ _Drinks! Let’s get you two something to drink! Does anyone want coffee?_ ”  
  
“One cream, no sugar,” the other Scully announced. She glared at Scully. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”  
  
Scully gritted her teeth, and left with Bruce for the kitchen.  
  
“Well…” Bruce trailed off when they entered the kitchen. “This is…well…” Then he sighed and walked over to the coffee machine. “Tina sure is going to freak out on the other end when she notices this thing is on...I normally never make coffee…” He opened a nearby drawer, extracted the coffeemaker instructions, and started reading them. “Anyway,” he continued, flipping to another page in the instructions booklet, “this is really…”  
  
“I think the word you’re searching for is ‘surreal,’” Scully volunteered.  
  
“That’s one word…” Bruce murmured. He opened a cabinet and pawed around until he found the coffee filters. “But then again, the last seven months have been surreal for me, so why should today be any different?”  
  
“The last six years have been surreal for me…” Scully mumbled, “so why should today be any different?”  
  
Bruce was whispering coffee grounds to water ratios to himself, so Scully tiptoed into the hallway and hid by the doorway to the living room. From her vantage point, she could make out a sliver of Mulder’s back, and could hear most of their conversation.  
  
“You can’t honestly believe this!” she heard herself saying. “Mulder, alternate realities? This is like something out of _Star Wars!_ ”  
  
“ _Star Trek_ is actually—“ Mulder started to correct her, but stopped. Scully could only guess that the other her had just shot him a quelling look.  
  
“Whatever it’s like, it’s ridiculous!” the other Scully continued. “I don’t know _who_ that woman in there _is_ , but she’s not _me!_ ”  
  
“Okay, then who do you think she is?” Mulder asked calmly.  
  
“Eddie van Blundht’s sister—an alien bounty hunter—”  
  
“Really?” Mulder sounded amused. “The alternate reality theory is too crazy for you, but you’re willing to go with the alien theory?”  
  
The other Scully sighed. “We need to come up with a code phrase.”  
  
“It _does_ seem like it would come in handy,” Mulder admitted.  
  
“It’s just—it’s so _strange_ seeing her standing there…” The other Scully’s voice was softer now, and through the crack in the doorway, Scully could tell that Mulder had taken a couple steps closer to her. “She looks exactly like me, Mulder…”  
  
“Not exactly,” Mulder murmured. “Your teeth are cleaner.”  
  
The other Scully gave a shaky laugh, and Mulder stepped even closer to her—  
  
And Scully staggered back to the kitchen. She had to leave—she felt like a peeping Tom. Only it was _her_ out there with _Mulder_ …but it wasn’t her and it wasn’t her Mulder…  
  
This was absurd.  
  
Bruce was now intently spooning coffee grounds into the filter.  
  
“Do you have any aspirin?” Scully asked. “I have a headache…”  
  
“In the bathroom over there,” Bruce pointed generally to the left, his eyes not leaving the spoon he’d lifted to eyelevel. “When they say ‘tablespoon,’ do they mean heaping or flat?”  
  
“Flat,” she informed him, walking to the bathroom. “And that’s a teaspoon you’re holding, not a tablespoon.”  
  
“Oh…thanks…”  
  
She shut the bathroom door and rummaged through the medicine cabinet, locating the aspirin and downing two of them without water. Then she grabbed a cat-patterned hand towel, soaked it in water, and wiped her face with it.  
  
She still didn’t feel any better. She lowered the toilet lid and sank onto it, wiping her face again with the towel.  
  
For the first time, Scully realized she was trapped—trapped in this alternate reality. Up until now, she’d been focusing so much on Bruce and Tina’s problems, but she was _trapped_. She didn’t have a home here or a family or a job—someone else had all those things…  
  
The other Scully would _not_ want to share her apartment or family or paycheck or _Mulder_ and she couldn’t really blame her but—  
  
And what was going on with Mulder? The Mulder on the other side, she meant—the real Mulder, _her_ Mulder…what was he thinking right now? Was he worried? She’d disappeared a day ago with no word. He was probably going crazy—and what would her family think? Just a couple years after she was miraculously cured from cancer—to just disappear?  
  
No. She wouldn’t.  
  
Her grip on the soaked hand towel tightened, wringing water droplets that dribbled down her leg.  
  
She stood up, looked at herself in the mirror, and inhaled and exhaled a few deep breaths. She was going to get back to her reality. She was going to take Bruce with her. She hadn’t gone through everything she’d gone through in the last six years to wind up squatting in a house with a cat motif in Columbus, Ohio. She had a life, and she was going to get back to it.  
  
“Listen up!” she ordered, striding into the living room.  
  
Mulder and the other Scully turned around. They had been standing very close by the window.  
  
“You don’t believe me—fine,” she announced. “I barely believe it, myself. I don’t need you to believe me.”  
  
Bruce hurried in from the kitchen. “For the record,” he piped up, “I just want to say that I believe you—”  
  
“But somewhere in that other reality,” she stepped forward and pointed to nothing in particular, “ _my partner_ is there, wondering what happened to me, and I have to get back to him.”  
  
“Also, my wife is there,” Bruce interposed. “Just to remind everybody.”  
  
“So, if you don’t believe me—fine—but right now I need someone with an open mind to _pretend_ like they believe me and explain _how_ this happened because I can’t do it alone!”  
  
She’d been looking at Mulder—who better to jump down the rabbit hole with?  
  
So, it was a surprise when it was the other Scully who spoke. “It’s the cell phones,” the woman said. She was regarding Scully with a soft, sympathetic expression.  
  
Everyone gaped at her.  
  
Seeing everyone's surprise, the other Scully coughed and quickly drained the emotion from face and voice. “According to your story, the cell phones are the common link between when Mr. Speta entered this reality and when you,” she waved her hand to indicate Scully, “entered this reality. Therefore, the logical conclusion is that the cell phones are the way in and out this reality. Probably because of some adjustments Mr. Speta made, and the coincidence that both times, both parties called each other at precisely the same time. That’s what I would think…if I believed,” she added hastily at the end.  
  
Mulder was gazing at the other Scully with a proud, soppy smile. Was _that_ how he looked at her?  
  
Bruce, on the other hand, was studying his Nokia. “That makes sense…” he said slowly. “I mean, as much as _any_ of this makes sense.” He pressed some buttons, and soon they heard a ringtone sounding from the den—where Scully had left Tina’s phone.  
  
She retrieved the phone from the den and answered it—but nothing happened.  
  
“The phones are both in this reality,” she sighed.  
  
“And no one’s calling from the other line,” the other Scully reminded them.  
  
“But if both phones are in this reality,” Mulder said, “how can anyone travel back to the other reality—that is,” he brushed his lower lip with his thumbnail again, “assuming that Bruce would go _back_ to that reality rather than Tina coming _to_ this reality and—”  
  
As Mulder talked himself through this mind bender, Bruce shouted, “I know!” and, not elaborating any further, disappeared into the hallway. He soon returned brandishing _another_ augmented Nokia.  
  
“My mom’s phone,” he explained. “I made one for her, too, but she could never figure out how to use the darn thing and eventually she started leaving it here so she would have an excuse not to use it.” He turned the phone over in his hands. “Maybe she was smart, all things considered.”  
  
“And if it’s here…” Scully thought aloud, “then it would be in the other reality, too!”  
  
“Right!” Mulder exclaimed, following the thread of the conversation once more. “So, what we need to do is get other-me or Tina to use that phone to call Bruce at exactly the same time as Bruce calls his mother’s phone!”  
  
“But how can we get them to do that?” the other Scully asked.  
  
Scully grinned. “I’ve got an idea,” she announced.  
  
***  
  
“I just got a call from the lieutenant,” Detective Lipinski announced, stuffing her cell phone into her jacket pocket. “He says they found your rental car at Crosscreek Park, but your partner wasn’t there. No signs of struggle—in fact, she didn’t even leave any footprints. Judging by the ground, it doesn’t look like she ever got out of the car.”  
  
“They must have missed something,” Mulder snapped, pacing past the fireplace. “People don’t just disappear!”  
  
If Tina had any objections to that last assertion, she didn’t voice them. She sat on the rose-patterned couch, hugging her unwilling cat to her chest.  
  
“We are _aware_ of that, Agent Mulder, but—” Lipinski stopped talking when Mulder held up a finger and shushed her. “What?”  
  
“Do you hear that?” he asked.  
  
The three occupants of the living room paused. The cat took the opportunity to wriggle from its owner’s grasp and shoot into the hallway.  
  
The shower was running.  
  
“The shower?” Tina asked, sounding disappointed. “Fox, that thing goes on and off all the time—”  
  
“Not at 11:30 am, it doesn’t,” he corrected her. He ran up the stairs, taking them two steps at a time, and rushed into the bathroom. He stared at the mirror.  
  
Written on the foggy mirror was a message: “Mulder, it’s me.”  
  
***  
  
Now that they had Mulder’s attention, the medium of communication switched from bathroom mirrors to a word document on Bruce’s computer. Bruce typed at lightning speed, explaining what they had figured out so far, giving Mulder the location of the phone, and discussing methods of coordinating their calls. Occasionally a question would come in red font (Mulder’s chosen color), but for the most part, Bruce controlled the conversation, with other-Scully occasionally leaning over his shoulder and identifying for him when his explanations were become difficult to follow.  
  
“This is amazing!” he giggled to other-Scully. “Isn’t this the craziest thing you’ve ever seen?”  
  
“Not quite,” other-Scully replied dryly, “but it’s up there.”  
  
Meanwhile, Scully and other-Mulder leaned against the wall at the other side of the den, watching their progress.  
  
“So…” Mulder eventually turned to her, “you’re Scully.”  
  
She nodded. “You’re Mulder,” she replied.  
  
He held out his hand for a shake. “Nice to meet you.”  
  
She took his hand and pumped it a few times. “Likewise.”  
  
Their hands returned to their sides, and they watched the progress at the computer. Then Mulder leaned into her ear. “Want to get some coffee?” he murmured.  
  
They walked into the kitchen to find Bruce’s coffee percolating. Mulder poured them both mugs, which neither of them touched. Instead, they just stared at each other awkwardly.  
  
Eventually, Mulder cleared his throat. “So, as long as you’re here—um—can I ask you something?”  
  
“Only if I can ask you something,” Scully countered.  
  
He grinned. “That sounds like a fair bargain. So…um…” he stared at the coffee as if it was the most interesting thing in the world. “Remember that whole Bermuda Triangle incident?”  
  
She rolled her eyes. “You mean when I found you lying face down in the ocean and then you did your best Dorothy impression? Yeah,” she nodded. “I remember.”  
  
“And you remember what I said in the hospital?”  
  
“Yes…” Suddenly, her coffee seemed like the most interesting thing in the world, too. “I remember…”  
  
“Well—”  
  
“Hey, come on, you two!” Bruce was standing in the doorway. “Mulder says he’s ready!” He clapped his hands together. “We don’t have all day—well,” he corrected, “I guess we _do,_ but I haven’t seen my wife in seven months, so I’m little bit impatient…” He headed back into the den.  
  
Mulder moved for the doorway, but before he did, he turned back to Scully. He took a deep breath. “I meant it,” he said quickly.  
  
A smile spread across Scully’s face, soon mirrored on Mulder’s face, and the two of them headed into the living room, where Bruce and other-Scully waited. Mulder sidled up to other-Scully and beamed at her, to which she just looked puzzled.  
  
“Are you ready?” other-Scully asked Bruce and Scully. She handed them Bruce’s phone.  
  
They nodded and held hands. They weren’t sure if it would make a difference, but better safe than sorry.  
  
“So, we need you to call Bruce’s mother at 12:00 exactly,” other-Scully instructed them. “Use the clock on the wall.” She nodded to the wall clock. Scully was grateful now that it had a second counter.  
  
It was 11:58. Two minutes left.  
  
“I’m finally going to see Tina again!” Bruce looked ready to burst. “I can’t believe this!” His palms were sweating.  
  
One minute and 34 seconds left.  
  
Scully glanced at Mulder, and he shot her a silly grin. Then she looked at other-Scully, and—  
  
“Oh, what the Hell,” other-Scully gasped, and pulled her into a hug. “Give ‘em Hell, Dana,” she ordered her.  
  
Scully laughed. “You, too. Thanks for everything…”  
  
“Okay—almost time!” Bruce shouted. Other-Scully stepped away, Bruce squeezed Scully’s hand, and they both placed their thumbs on the “call” button on his cell phone.  
  
“Ten, nine, eight—” Mulder started chanting.  
  
“Seven, six, five—” other-Scully joined him.  
  
“Four, three, two, one—” and Scully and Bruce pushed the “call” button just as “Incoming Call” flashed across the screen.  
  
“Bruce!” The first thing Scully was aware of was Tina hurtling towards them, enveloping Bruce in a tight hug. The Nokia clattered to the floor, probably breaking (and good riddance).  
  
“Well, I’ll be…” Scully turned to the second speaker, and saw Detective Lipinski staring open mouthed at the new arrivals.  
  
Next to her stood Mulder, who was beaming, the cell phone still in his hand. “Hey Scully,” he said after a few seconds, “so how was your trip?”  
  
Scully marched over to him and leaned her head against his chest, feeling his arms wrap around her. “It was okay,” she murmured into his shirt, “but there’s no place like home.”  
  
“Happiest place on Earth?” he rumbled, kissing the top of her head.  
  
“Blows Disneyland out of the water.”  
  
***  
  
“So,” Scully said as they pulled out of Tina and Bruce’s subdivision, “I’m thinking Italian.”  
  
“Huh?” Mulder looked at her curiously.  
  
“Italian,” Scully repeated. “For that dinner you owe me.”  
  
“For that dinner _I_ owe you?”  
  
“I won our bet. I told you it wasn’t a ghost.”  
  
“You _won?_ ” Mulder eyes darted from the road to goggle at her incredulously. “Scully, you thought it was either Tina seducing me or an _intruder!_ ”  
  
“No-no,” Scully raised a finger, “I thought it was someone _physically_ causing the strange phenomena. I was right. It was Bruce _physically_ turning the lights—”  
  
“No,” Mulder interrupted, “I was the one who thought _Bruce_ was on a different plane of reality—”  
  
“Yeah, the spirit world! Not an alternate dimension!”  
  
Mulder started laughing, and his eyes returned to the road. “I cannot believe you’re trying to weasel out of buying me dinner, Scully. Bad sportsmanship—”  
  
“—I can’t believe you’re honestly claiming that _you_ won! I was the one who figured the truth out!” Scully pointed out, shaking her head. “I won!”  
  
“No—that wasn’t our bet…”  
  
The argument lasted well beyond their plane touching down in Washington, D.C. By the end of it, Scully’s cheeks ached, because the whole time, she hadn’t been able to stop smiling at her Mulder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaand that's the end. Thanks for reading. Anyway, I would really appreciate comments. This is the first "serious" X-Files fanfiction I have written (my others are goofy crossovers), so I was pretty nervous about posting this. Hope you liked it.


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